The arrest of Graham Linehan should be a turning point

When a comedy writer is seized by armed police over tweets, Britain’s free speech crisis can no longer be ignored.

How many more controversies will it take? The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow Airport has become an international news story because it so self-evidently tyrannical. The stress of the ordeal raised his blood pressure to an alarming degree and he was rushed to hospital. With the help of the Free Speech Union, Graham is now suing the Metropolitan Police. You can donate to his crowdfunder here.

It is reassuring to see that some action is being taken against such chilling state overreach, but when will our politicians follow suit? Many of us have been warning about this ongoing assault on liberty for many years, and at every watershed moment we’ve been led to believe that something will be done. Then, inevitably, the ‘blob’ is activated and swallows up any potential for progress in its viscous and undulating folds.

So when Sir Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police, complains that the police are acting on unclear laws, and that the responsibility for the maltreatment of the likes of Graham lies with those in power, he’s overlooking the impact of the activist middlemen. Let’s not forget that the Home Office has twice instructed the College of Policing to stop the recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) and has been ignored. Or that the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, said the solution to the complaints about NCHIs might be to rename them. As though the public’s concerns about this brazen authoritarianism might be assuaged with a touch of rebranding.

Rowley’s buck-passing is likewise inadequate. He claimed that Graham’s arrest was necessary because officers ‘had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed’, which is palpably untrue. He said: ‘I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position’. He also made clear that police would continue to behave in this way ‘unless the law and guidance is changed or clarified’.

But this is precisely the problem. At present, a quango called the College of Policing trains officers in England and Wales. In my article for UnHerd about Graham’s arrest (which you can read here) I make the case that the College of Policing has become woefully unfit for purpose due to activist capture. For a long time, agitators within the system have reinterpreted and fudged the actual law in favour of what they would like it to be. This has led to some police acting in potentially criminal ways. Most egregiously, there is clear evidence of systemic bias against gender-critical individuals within the police force, and a reluctance to apply identical standards to trans activists who routinely post threats of death and rape and are rarely investigated for it.

Ideological capture of the law means corruption. Many will recall when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) released a false statement in the case of Lucy Connolly, saying that she had ‘told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them’. This was entirely untrue – she had been specifically talking about the dangers of illegal immigrants who had not been vetted – but by the time the CPS issued a correction, she had been sentenced to 31 months in prison.

I have sympathy for those police officers who are hamstrung into enacting vague authoritarian directives from above, although we have also seen individual officers gleefully abusing their powers to punish wrongthink. We should never be in a situation where the CPS and police are misrepresenting the truth to secure convictions for political or ideological reasons. It’s reminiscent of the febrile atmosphere following posthumous allegations of sexual abuse against Jimmy Savile, when it was revealed that prosecutors and police had withheld evidence in forty-seven cases of rape and sexual assault which would have seen defendants exonerated. They were so determined to fulfil their conviction quotas that there were willing to sacrifice citizens who they knew were innocent.

And yet for all the apologies, the robotic recitations that ‘lessons have been learned’, nothing is ever actually done to rectify the problem. Why has no law been passed to enable the government to remove judges who clearly prioritise activism over justice? Why are no politicians grappling the nettle of ‘hate speech’ laws and wrenching them from the statute books? Why has no-one in parliament even suggested abolishing the College of Policing and replacing it with something that would train police to uphold the law, not act as armed goons for the genderist movement?

Writing about his arrest on his Substack, Graham pointed out that the arresting officers were ‘using activist language’. Specifically, one of the officers had defined ‘trans people’ as those ‘who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth’. The reason why trans crybullies have been able to weaponised the police against their targets for so many years is that their high priests currently hold sway in the upper echelons of the policing administration.

Don’t believe me? Alex Marshall, former chief executive of the College of Policing, was the recipient of the top award from Stonewall, the UK’s most prominent genderist campaign group. Marshall was appointed as ‘LGBT envoy’ to the government, and it was only one year into his tenure that ‘non-crime hate incidents’ were introduced. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. One former detective told me that for twenty-five years policing has ‘been pulled around, by the nose, by self-appointed community leaders and fringe political groups’. Police officers, in other words, are being trained to defy the government in order to enforce the ideological beliefs of campaigners.

If Graham’s arrest is to have any positive outcome, it must be that those in power now commit to making actual steps towards healing this rotten system. Rowley is right that police are being misled, but our current government has no desire to do away with the unelected officials and bureaucrats in administrative positions who effectively set the agenda.

When asked about Graham’s arrest at Prime Minister’s Questions, Keir Starmer managed to hold a straight face while saying: ‘We have a long history of free speech in this country. I’m very proud of that and I will always defend it.’ Very well. Let’s see him abolish the College of Policing, repeal all ‘hate speech’ legislation, do away with the notion of ‘protected characteristics’, and implement laws to tackle activist influences in the CPS, the judiciary and the police. If he cannot commit to any of this, his defence of free speech will be seen for what it is: the empty cant of a leader who looked the other way while liberty died.

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